16 Responses:

I'm not sure what you mean - in general FreeBSD has one of the most up-to-date package collections. For XScreenSaver in particular it has 5.38 in the ports collection and I expect 5.39 will arrive within a few days.

While I'm not involved in other BSDs I expect they all have at least a relatively recent version.

Still just wondering who would eschew the main draw of RHEL for budgetary reasons then choose to run a distro that's based on years-old software. Probably the same people that complain when a developer drops WinXP support. In 2018.

Who? People who need to run software that is only certified on very specific OS versions (e.g. some CAD tools) or run hardware that only has drivers for specific versions (e.g. oldish PCIe boards). Yes, you may try to run on other versions, but you're asking for a world of pain. Try to avoid unnecessary worlds of pain.

I didn't realize the Linux kernel deprecated very specific, old-ish PCIe drivers. I thought that pretty much never happened. My bad.

In any case, the original jwz argument stands. If you're running CentOS you should know you're choosing/forced to run old software and perhaps take two seconds to check before you go firing off bug reports willy-nilly.

Those people who need to run systems that act very much like RHEL, e.g. for development, testing, compatibility or other purposes, but don't need support and/or don't want to spend the licensing cost.

Last I checked CentOS was 100% binary compatible with RHEL, so for all but the most odd use cases (things that check for active RHN subscriptions or the exact format of the /etc/redhat-release file or something) CentOS is good enough.

But when I do this I also understand that I'm running old(er) software and the consequences that come with it, so... ::shrug::

As written by jwz in the xscreensaver source code, as also quoted in the linked post about Debian:

I am constantly getting email from users reporting bugs that have been fixed for literally years who have no idea that the software they are running is years out of date. Yes, it would be great if we lived in the ideal world where people checked that they were running the latest release before they report a bug, but we don't. To most people, "running the latest release" is synonymous with "running the latest release that my distro packages for me."

When they even bother to tell me what version they're running, I say, "That version is three years old!", and they say "But this is the latest version my distro ships". Then I say, "your distro sucks", and they say "but I don't know how to compile from source, herp derp I eat paste", and everybody goes away unhappy.

It wastes an enormous amount of my time, and kind of makes me regret ever having released this software in the first place.